Less work, more sight-seeing

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Well my last entry was on Monday Jan 24th, so I’ll pick up from there...

That night I went out with a bunch of European students to a spoken word night at a bar in Belleville – by FAR the coolest thing I’ve done in Paris! Belleville is the artists’ area now, very cheap and cheerful, and a really nice atmosphere. The bar was extremely colourful and hippie-ish – we were drinking green tea and/or wine. The ‘spoken word’ stuff was surprisingly good (some of it) – a lot of poetry and a couple of short plays, too! I was pleasantly surprised. I’m hoping to go back, but didn’t make it last week. I’ll keep you posted!

I don’t remember doing anything particularly exciting for the rest of that week, but I must have done something...there was a lot of drama at work, however! They want to merge the school with another one, thereby cutting lots of jobs, so obviously everyone’s furious. That Thursday I didn’t have classes because the teacher I was working with was ranting and raving with most of the others about the merger! They’re planning to strike this Thursday, but everything’s calmed down a bit now that the mock exams have started, so I don’t know if they actually will.

More excitingly, Dave came to visit from Saturday through to Thursday, and I had a Burns’ Supper! It was amazing. Andrew from Stirling was there with Cathy (just visiting Paris for a week), and Charlie and a friend from uni – which happens to be the same uni as Andrew and Cathy! And Lenore and Mahmoud and Anna and Lyosha were there as well. Major kudos to Andrew for bringing single malt whisky and oatcakes, not to mention much Crabbie’s ginger wine! That what I did on Friday and Saturday, then: I went in search of haggis, and I make cock-a-leekie soup! It was very tasty, if I do say so myself! AND I’ve finally used up the last of the Thanksgiving turkey! The Burns’ supper itself was great – Charlie did the Address, we had a Selkirk Grace, we had toasts but not speeches to the lassies and the response (at the time only Dave and Andrew were there to toast us, though), and many other toasts as well. And everyone loved the haggis. Luckily not enough for me to have no leftovers at all, although there weren’t many! It was strange to speak to Lyosha in English, too, but it made a nice change.

That was on Tuesday night (only a week late) – other than that I took Dave to the Louvre and to dinner a couple of times, and pointed out the obvious touristy things. He went back to Oxford on Thursday. Andrew and Cathy were still around, though, and we went for a nice dinner up in Montmartre. I should probably give the restaurants a miss for a week or so!

On Friday I had 3 fewer classes than expected, so I went to see the King’s Speech – it’s amazing, go see it! On Saturday I had my first ‘conversation exchange’ – basically, I met up with one of my teacher’s daughters, and we had tea and chatted, first in French, then in English. It was great – she showed me round a new bit of the city, and has offered to invite me to intellectual parties at the Ecole Normale! Watch this space.

That night I went out for drinks with Anna and her friend, who knows the other assistants I’ve met! We went to Bastille (also very cool) and found a bar where I managed to waylay a random in a kilt for the rugby score. We decided it wasn’t too bad, and we’d given it a fair go with 3 tries. 

After UUFP on Sunday I had a bit of a wander to try to buy a biscuit tin but they were all really expensive. Not such a good story...today, however, I’ve been frighteningly productive! I had to be at work from 8 til 11 this morning, to be a sort of supply invigilator. Basically I sat in a freezing cold corridor being brought coffee and reading a novel for 3 hours. Much more boring than it sounds! Tomorrow I’m doing the same, but only for 2 hours, then actually teaching for one, which will be nice. After work I was still very caffeinated, and did the shopping, did up my CV, wrote a cover letter and filled in an application form, all before lunch! After that I went to the Pere Lachaise cemetery – it’s a beautiful day, I’ve been waiting for good weather to do a lot of outdoors things like that and the Rodin museum. It was nice, absolutely huge and a little daunting, all the tombs are massive. Of course I went to find Oscar Wilde, stumbled upon Balzac on the way too, which was nice. I ended up in the Marais afterwards, and paid far too much for tea and cake and posh-people-watching. Which was a lot of fun.

Maybe I’ll have coffee tomorrow and be this productive again!

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